Paul A. Scheet MS, PhD

Paul Scheet, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, with joint appointments in the Depts. of Genomic Medicine and Translational Molecular Pathology. A statistical geneticist with interests in complex disease and cancer genomics, Dr. Scheet serves as Leader of MD Anderson’s CCSG “Risk, Detection and Outcomes” Program.

He leads or co-leads projects to discover risk alleles for pancreatic cancer and study the evolution to metastasis from primary lung cancer. Of particular interest in recent years is the detection of acquired chromosomal alterations existing at low intra-sample frequencies, such as when a small proportion of the cells in a heterogeneous mixture exhibit these mutations. Dr. Scheet’s lab has helped pioneer methods to more accurately distinguish these alterations using information on the order of inherited alleles on a chromosome, i.e. the haplotypes.

After completing a B.A. in Biology, Dr. Scheet worked on the Human Genome Project at the Genome Center at Washington University in St. Louis, performing Sanger sequencing and informatics. To complement interests in large-scale genetic data and population genetics, he pursued studies in Statistics, with a master’s (Iowa, 2000) and Ph.D. (Washington, 2006), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Univ. of Michigan, before joining MD Anderson in 2008. At Washington, he developed a statistical model that captured features of the genealogy of chromosomes in a population.